Apologies for the intermittent downtime over the past hour or so. One of the datacenters we work with experienced a full power failure taking our servers and upstream equipment with it.

We pride ourselves on having near perfect uptime so this is a real blow. We take care to only work with providers that can provide redundancy for every possible system and will be working with our vendors to see why the UPS systems didn't kick in as expected.

We received some complaints from users that were receiving a false positive notification for their sites, this was a false positive and the issue has been rectified, our sincere apologies for any problems this may have caused.

There has been a problem with one of our partners that has, regrettably, resulted in links on publisher sites being rewritten and redirected. We have disabled the affected code until this is fully resolved. All whos.amung.us features work as intended and without issue, the only thing missing is the what's being copied stats, once the issue is resolved these will be back.

whos.amung.us has worked with Tynt since 2009 to bring you stats about the top phrases and images that were being copied off of your site, they provide a great service and we were able to work with them to provide a small subset of what they provide to whos.amung.us users.

Recently, we got some publisher complaints that links on their sites were being redirected through the domain vlr.tynt.com. This immediately raised red flags as our widgets are specifically tailored to ensure the publishers site is never modified in any way. Once we determined that the affected code was coming from the Tynt copy and paste stats JavaScript code we immediately disabled the code in all widgets, and it remains that way as of this posting. We will re-enable the copy and paste stats as soon as we have resolved the issue with our partner.

If you see any redirects, empty your browser cache and reload the page, browser cached versions of the widget code may still load the affected code. Also, if you've copied the whos.amung.us widget Javascript code to your own server, please point it back to the original location (ie. http://whos.amung.us/classic.js, http://whos.amung.us/small.js, http://whos.amung.us/colored.js, http://whos.amung.us/tab.js, or http://whos.amung.us/map.js) so that you ensure you are not loading an old version of the widget code.

Once again, apologies to all of our affected publishers, we are here to help and absolutely want to make sure our widgets provide the best service possible and that includes never manipulating your page content.

A few days ago it was brought to our attention that widgets on Wordpress.com hosted sites were no longer functioning and displaying an incorrect concurrent user count.(if you run your own install of WP on your own server this wouldn't have affected you).

What happened was that, in the latest update to the Wordpress.com platform, the Photon functionality was turned on by default. Photon retrieves images embedded in your blog once and then hosts them off of Wordpress' servers to speed up blog serving time by reducing the number of locations your browser has to look for image assets. While this is a great feature in most cases it causes a problem for services like whos.amung.us where we rely on the blog users loading the widget image from our servers so that they can be counted in the stats. With Photon proxying our widget images no one was getting counted in the stats for sites hosted on Wordpress.com as the end users never requested the widget images from us directly.

We've been working with Automattic (the fantastic company behind Wordpress) over the past few days to find a solution that allows whos.amung.us widgets to continue functioning on Wordpress.com hosted blogs, and I'm happy to report that there is a solution now in place that allows the whos.amung.us widget to work properly once again!

You shouldn't need to make any changes to your widget code, but if you are seeing a lot of "Unknown" users in the readers list on your whos.amung.us stat pages you might want make a very small change to your widget code to serve the widget off of https and not http.

Change it to:
<a href="http://whos.amung.us/stats/cgkoub7au35q/">
<img src="https://whos.amung.us/widget/cgkoub7au35q.png" width="81" height="29" border="0" title="Click to see how many people are online" />
</a>

The only difference is the http in the img tag has been converted to https .